What I Read in April, 2020
I read four books in April. It was a busy month of reading for two reasons. First, the shelter-in-place era naturally lends itself to reading. Second, we moved into a new place, resulting in a lot of time spent painting, driving, and doing other various activities that afforded me the time for lots of audiobook reading.
Beyond the books I finished, I made major headway in two other books, making this probably the busiest reading month I’ve had in some time.
Books I Finished in April
This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith
On Writing by Stephen King
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Books I Partially Read in April
Beloved by Toni Morrison
CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O'Neill
The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern by Robert Morrison
Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by Emma Smith
Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson
50% Fiction
The trend has broken. For the first month in 2020, the majority of the books I read were not non-fiction. They weren’t fiction, either. There was no majority. Two novels, two works of non-fiction.
Something else to say about all four of these books is they skewed lighter, in a certain sense. This might not seem true at first. The Dead Zone involves serial killers and assassination. On Writing includes the real life incident of Stephen King getting run over by a van. My Struggle is about a man who seems to hate most things about his life.
But each of these books is set somewhere farther in the past, looking back—a far cry from the anxiety-inducing realities of Winners Take All and Invisible Women. That, and all four of these books—even My Struggle—seem to have been written not just to inform but to entertain.
As I texted my brother while reading it: “I’m listening to James Franco read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. It’s just what the doctor ordered.” And it was!
But before I got to that, I first had to learn about Shakespeare.
Why Did We Need Another Shakespeare Book? Because We Did
Emma Smith’s This is Shakespeare, like a lot of the books I’ve read in 2020, came into my bubble of awareness through a best-of-2019 list. There were two such lists that inspired much of my recent reading: Obama’s favorite books of the year and The Economist’s books of the year. I think there’s a healthy balance between the two lists—and also a surprising amount of overlap.
My first thought, seeing This is Shakespeare on The Economist’s list, was that it seemed weird someone would decide we needed one more Shakespeare book—especially one called This is Shakespeare. I didn’t think I needed to read a beginner’s guide to Shakespeare, no complete guide or idiot’s guide, but I also didn’t exactly feel qualified to read something too academic or that assumed the audience had too much of a built-in knowledge.
This.
This is Shakespeare fills some middle ground that I hadn’t realized I needed. It was accessible but challenging, readable but intellectual, and entirely entertaining
Like two of the other books on this list, I read it via audiobook. I spent a lot of April doing two things: going on walks or moving into a new house. These were the two things I did when I wasn’t working. Both activities pair well with an audiobook.
I think it’s likely that This is Shakespeare is my favorite book I’ve read this year. I also think there’s a particular audience for it that, like some of my other favorite books, means I have to be thoughtful about who I recommend it to. It’s not a book to recommend to the person you know who only reads a handful of books a year. It’s also not a book for someone with only a passing interest in Shakespeare. Any reader of This is Shakespeare needs to be fully bought-in on Shakespeare’s significance, if not necessarily Shakespeare’s genius.
The book’s central conceit, if it has one—and at times I wasn’t sure it did have one, but also wasn’t sure if that mattered—is that the defining characteristic of Shakespeare is the ambiguity baked into every Shakespeare play. The book covers about half of Shakespeare’s plays, taking us in chronological order from the beginning of his career to his death (without bothering with any of those pesky Shakespeare identity conspiracy theories.)
It begins with The Taming of the Shrew, which I previously could not have told you is either a controversial play or an ambiguous one. In fact, my awareness of The Taming of the Shrew was mostly limited to 10 Things I Hate About You. I’ve never read or seen the play and have never felt a compelling need to read it, having felt (whether I realized it or not) that I got a pretty good understanding of it from that Heather Ledger and Julia Stiles 90s teen comedy.
This was basically everything I knew about The Taming of the Shrew.
The Taming of the Shrew is a perfect place for Smith to have started her book, at least for me. I had no idea that the original play contains deep ambiguities about the motivations of the characters or the question of whether or not the ending is happy.
I was more familiar with the majority of the other plays she covered, although there were a few—Measure for Measure and several of the histories, in particular—where I had a hard time keeping up with Smith. She doesn’t bother giving you full synopses of any of the plays, assuming either you’ve already seen them, read them, or can get that synopsis elsewhere. Her book is a companion to Shakespeare’s work, not a replacement for it.
I finished This is Shakespeare with a renewed interest in Shakespeare. I think from this standpoint alone, it’s a successful book. Again, I think it’s my favorite book I’ve read so far in 2020.
On Stephen King
I tried launching straight from This is Shakespeare into another audiobook off The Economist’s list, this one called The Regency Years. About an hour into The Regency Years is when I realized I needed to shift gears. While full of information about interesting characters in a time period I know relatively little about—from the Prince Regent to Coleridge to the Luddites—it just wasn’t doing it for me. I think it simply required too much of me.
So instead, I decided on a re-read of a book I’ve read at least twice before.
On Being Angry at Stephen King
I was angry at Stephen King a year ago. I paid a painful amount of money to see his “band”, the Rock Bottom Remainders, play at First Avenue in Minneapolis. I went with my fiancee (at the time, my girlfriend) Molly to see his band on a Friday evening. The next day was an early morning (fishing opener—making this writing of this blog post almost exactly a year later) but I felt as if I had to experience both of these things in the same weekend.
Unfortunately, I had the wrong idea about the quality of the band I was there to see. The only reason this group of people—including Dave Barry, Amy Tan, and the guy who wrote those Tuesdays with Morrie books—was on stage was because they were all famous for a reason that had nothing to do with their ability to play music. I recall that the crowd seemed a mixture of enthusiastic and exhausted, skewing exhausted and disappointed as the night went on. Or maybe that was just me.
Google’s labeling of this as a “supergroup” is really something.
It had come at a bad time. I’d already become irritated with King after attempting and abandoning Mr. Mercedes, then reading the wildly disappointing The Outsider, then slogging through an audiobook of Sleeping Beauties. Seeing him on stage struggling through guitar riffs and fumbling his way through a needless rendition of “Stand By Me” would have made me sad rather than angry, had I not paid a total of $80 for the privilege of this show.
I hadn’t read anything by him since then—but finishing This is Shakespeare left me craving something readable, engaging, educational, and literary. For whatever reason it was On Writing that popped into my head while I was washing the dishes in our former apartment one night and it was On Writing that scratched the itch.
I burned through it. I loved it. It was just as good as I remembered it—his childhood anecdotes, his advice to never use adverbs with dialogue tags, his belief that stories are unearthed from where they’re buried rather than invented.
I consumed much of the book in the same way I’d flown through This is Shakespeare: packing up our apartment and walking around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. I finished it while painting the walls of the living room at our new home, the same place where I’m writing this blog post now.
On Writing left me inspired to write. But it also left me inspired to do something else. Something more immediate: read more Stephen King. So I downloaded the aforementioned The Dead Zone, a novel by him published in the late 1970s but never read by me. I’d watched the movie a few years ago, a Cronenberg film starring a young Christopher Walken as the hero and Martin Sheen as the villain.
Christopher Walken as the least likely American hero.
I suspected that I knew the broad strokes of the story. I was not wrong. It matches up closely with the film, although with much more story, many more characters, and quite a few subplots and detours that didn’t make it into the Cronenberg version. I’m shocked I hadn’t read it sooner. I think it might be one of his best novels. And I’ve read, well, probably forty or so books by him.
I don’t want to editorialize much more about The Dead Zone. Other than to say that for a book written over four decades ago, it seems painfully timely, bordering on prescient. I know The Stand is the vogue Stephen King book to reference in these pandemic days, but The Dead Zone is right up there with it.
A Quick Note on Subtitles
In my last installment of this series, I pointed out the ever-increasing lengths of the subtitles of the books I was reading.
Perhaps this is what attracted me to both This is Shakespeare and On Writing, as they’re two of the only non-fiction books I can think of that don’t have enormous subtitles appended onto their names. Instead, the only long-winded title was Knausgaard’s book, with it’s two subtitles: first, Book 2. Then: A Man in Love.
Did I choose This is Shakespeare and On Writing because of their succinct titles? No. But was it a nice change of pace? Sure. Did it stick? No—check out the subtitles on two of those books at the top of this blog post.
Karl Ove Knausgaard Has to To Think About His Entire Life When He Smokes a Cigarette
You’ll have to forgive me. I made this same joke during my last blog post. But I cannot stop comparing Knausgaard’s My Struggle novels to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
This guy…
I read the first book of My Struggle a few years ago, when I was in a book club for men. The first volume is entirely about his relationship with his father and his father’s death. The second book—subtitled A Man in Love—is the story of Knausgaard meeting, falling in love with, and marrying his wife, Linda, and the subsequent births of their three children. It’s 592 pages of that and not much more than that. It’s dramatic, not because anything very dramatic happens but because Knausgaard is a very dramatic man. He spends the book struggling to write, feeling like a failure, drinking too much, and apparently believing himself to be an emasculated husk of a man because he cooks meals and pushes his children around Stockholm in a stroller.
Like a lot of people who’ve read any of the My Struggle books, I have a hard time explaining why I like them so much. I’ve only read the first two but I ordered the third immediately after finishing Book 2 and intend to start it soon. Knausgaard is obnoxious, exhausting, self-centered, and whiny—but the apparent honesty with which the book is written won me over, even if the honesty is pretentious and feigned (which it may or may not be; the verdict is out, at least for me.)
I found myself reading it almost every evening, underlining sections, dog-earing pages, re-reading sections because I found them so compelling and truthful. Like this paragraph:
How was it possible to waste your life getting angry about housework. How was it possible?
Or, maybe my favorite scene ever, when he describes in exhausting detail his experience looking himself up on Google.
Then I saw down in front of the computer, accessed the Net, checked my e-mails, nothing, went onto a few websites, and Googled myself. There were more than twenty-nine thousand hits. The figure rose and sank like a kind of index. I surfed and clicked at random. Steered clear of the interviews and reviews, clicked on some of the blogs.
It goes on from there, ending only when his wife Linda tells him to stop it. I know that My Struggle is ostensibly a novel and not a memoirs or non-fiction, but is there any other scene in which an author or celebrity is honest enough to tell the story of Googling themself?
The last thing I’ll say is something I’m paraphrasing from a review I found elsewhere online and now I can’t track down: My Struggle would be really bad if it wasn’t just so damn good.
More Books
I won’t get into my thoughts on CHAOS or Beloved or the other partially read April books now. But one last note: I wrote about my January reading on the second of February, my February reading on the seventh of March, and my March reading on the 12th of April. Now it is the 15th of May. These blog posts seem to be taking more and more of my efforts. I have already begun to compile notes on my May reading, hoping I can get the next one of these out earlier in June. But it’s halfway through May and I’ve already read four books…